Transcript:
Tom Vaughan:
Hello, everybody, welcome to Monday, the S&P 500 was down 1.14%. Today, we can a little bit more conservative today in our allocations, we cut back the four pieces of our targeted indexes, we now have 75% exposure for our stock market, you know, components. We did this in the IRAs, not in the taxable accounts, because it’s, you know, we don’t want to take capital gains right now, with only 11 days left in the year. And the reason we did this, because seeing I’m seeing a strong correlation to what’s going on right now, versus what happened at the end of 2018. At the end of 2018, we had an economy look like it was slowing down due to some China trade wars that were happening. And the Federal Reserve was still aggressively raising interest rates. And we ended up with nearly a 20% downturn from high to low. And so we have something similar here.
Omicron is scaring people. Whether deserves to be scary or not, we don’t know. We still don’t know all the severity symptoms, but it’s contagious. It’s everywhere. It’s the sports leagues are canceling games and postponing games, getting a lot of press, Europe is starting to tighten up some of their restrictions, companies are cutting back on Christmas parties cutting back on coming back to work, these are all potential things that even if the virus is determined, at some point in time to be less severe than thought that, you know, still might slow down the economy here. You combine that with the bill better back program, now having some, you know, troubles getting through the Senate, which is also an economic hit. And then you look at the 10 year treasury bond has gone from 1.7% yield down to 1.4. It’s a sign that the bond market thinks that the economy is actually slowing down. All of these things are probably okay, except when you throw in the Federal Reserve getting more aggressive and trying to slow things down, and especially the way that they’ve been talking about it. And so they’re really trying to fight inflation, that honestly, between Omicron and maybe settling up the supply chain constraints could take care of all by themselves and might not have inflation.
So if you’re fighting inflation, that doesn’t end up being there, that means you’re going to have a lot slower scenario. If the Fed wasn’t there, they were still being accommodative still buying these 100 $20 million of bonds, I think the market probably does, okay, here, what we saw over the last year and a half, we’ve had lots of variants and rises and cases, maybe not something quite this fast. But still, we’ve had that we’ve had some good stock markets through most of that. We’ve had all kinds of government issues that haven’t gotten through and different things. And the market is still done really well, when you throw in the Federal Reserve into that piece too. And really, we’re in this weird window right now with the holidays, Federal Reserve isn’t going to be meeting again until January.
The other good piece of news that are probably come out will be the earnings, but that again will be till January. So you get this kind of low volume period of time, where all the news is kind of negative. And the good news might be delayed. You know, we’ll probably find out at some point in the future how severe this Omicron is. That could be good news, maybe so who knows. So nonetheless, we’ve got to kind of sit back here be a little bit more conservative in my opinion. I I’m very optimistic all the time. But I’ve always told you that I would tell you when I thought things were you know, you know a little bit one more negative side we’ve made a couple of adjustments really even says just October, there’s an awful lot more rockiness going on in the market. So this is a good time to kind of be broad market exposure for all of our stock pieces because we don’t know what’s going to do well small caps did fantastic on Friday got hammered today. You know so that’s that’s what’s been going on almost every other day, there’s something happening where one piece is doing well and another isn’t. So keep keep we’ll keep our you know, stock Mark exposure spread, and then keep some of the pieces, you know, really in the in the bond market for now, because I think that’s a place to go. So anyway, that’s what’s happening right now. Look forward to seeing what’s going to happen tomorrow. Thank you very much.